gim73:Wow, zone of the enders is pretty damn old. I'm amazed they chose something that came out in the first generation of ps2 games. What's next? Are they gonna dust off Legend of the Dragoon or Grandia 2 (saturn version).

Here's to hoping!

Great vid guys, i did have to snigger at the cockpit joke "I'm not playing this game!" Brings back memories though, ZOE was one of the first PS2 games i played.

webrunner:ZOE2 was a lot better (although it also had some pretty ridiculous cutscenes)

Agree 100%. Second Runner is an amazing game.

I'll second that, Second Runner was a lot more fun.

I'll third that as well. Second Runner was the better game. In fact, it's probably the best mech game there is at this time. The only thing that bothers me is that it's kinda as short as the orginal ZOE in terms of gameplay time. Usually can take anyone four to six hours to beat ZOE2, maybe even less.

OmegaXIII:Wow, zone of the enders is pretty damn old. I'm amazed they chose something that came out in the first generation of ps2 games. What's next? Are they gonna dust off Legend of the Dragoon or Grandia 2 (saturn version).

i'm waiting for them to bust open a crash bandicoot, that would be hilarious.

That cut-scene focused heavily on close-ups on the boys face. Doesn't have to be a bad thing, it is perfect for showing of emotion, but they could at least have focused on making that particular artwork look better.

So terrible I actually bought Eternal Sonata on the strength of that Unskippable. Well, OK-on the strength of that Unskippable, and it being sold second-hand for £1. I figured cutscenes that awful deserved a pound of my money just for sheer cheese factor, and I do not think it'll disappoint in that...

This game, at the time, was sort of the Assassin's Creed of it's day. It had some great ideas, but most of them were overdone or just done badly, but it was still a fun game. Then it's sequal came out and did EVERTYING better.

I love both of the ZOE games, but the second one was better by far. It was an awsome mech game and I look forward to how it'll end up in the possible third installment that Kojima discussed wanting to make a while back.

This was maybe the first game I beat on the PS2, owing to the fact that the PS2 was very popular at the time and everybody had eaten up the memory cards before I could buy one so I had to beat the entire game without saving. Thankfully this only took about four hours.

For three-dimensional mecha-porn on a console you could do far worse than Zone of the Enders, and especially its much-better sequel. The controls are surprisingly effective, and the fluid animation has all the trappings of a Kojima production; the devil truly is in the small visual touches. The sparks kick up as your pointed feet leave lines on the ground. There's dust everywhere. Your wing-like boosters expand and contract and move with you. You slash and parry at blistering pace in an intense battle against your nemesis. Your damage approaches critical and red pulsations cascade down your metal figure as you summon a great ball of plasma to fire at your foe. Simply acting and moving around with a mecha in a game has never been so elegant and fluid. It's not a Heavy Gear or a Mechwarrior or, dare I say it, Steel Battalion experience of near simulation. That would just get in the way. The handling is deliberately smooth.

The unique mechanical designs reinforce a sense of separation from other contemporaries, and also plays with the sense that there is something important you're always missing about your frame and it's mysterious "Metatron" power source. Even near the end of the second game, this strange otherness is still being reinforced.

Perhaps most importantly for a game of this type, what I characterise as a modern epic story, it does a good job of making the player's actions important. You play a game of this type to step into the shoes of an epic hero for a short while (in the case of the first, I'd say Jehuty is the hero; Leo Stenbuck, not so much), and an epic hero you be, with all the power and the caveats that stem from it.

Sure the games are linear, with no real meaningful decisions to make on your part. Sure the stories are predictable even with their twists. But surprising you with depth is not the goal; this is Beowulf, not The Bible. You are a hero, there is a monster; go slay the monster. It's the euphoria of playing as the force that single-handedly changes the outcome of some events. I know a lot of people are looking for more "depth" these days; to be presented with a moral after all is said and done, but I prefer my linear action-packed cinematic experience to be given sans clumsy drama. This isn't a game that was made for such things.

This isn't to say the ZoE games aren't without flaws and annoyances. For example, the annoying "Save Tapir/some civilians/these worthless sidekicks/your annoying captor"-type things that form the slow parts; I could do without that. Also the final series of battles took far too long, in my opinion. It would have been more compelling to add more variation to it and less muscle memory.

PS: The "Ring Radar" is an absolutely fantastic mechanism for keeping track of things.

Oh boy... just looking at that cutscene was painfull (however you made it funnny). look like another game where a little untrained kid who has no clue on combat turn into an unstoppable, expert killing machine.